Kinnard creates his own film festival

Retrospective features his pics

David Kinnard is ready for his closeup.

Rather waiting for Hollywood to come knocking, the Nashville thesp conceived the First Annual Ever (Possibly Never to Be Repeated) David Kinnard Film Festival, a two-hour retrospective featuring shorts and clips from indie movies in which he’s appeared.

It’s a bold move for a man with just one IMDb credit to his name, but the lifelong performer — a familiar face on “Stubby’s Place,” a Nashville public access show actually drew about 50 fans to Cafe Coco, an old house-turned-restaurant , where he kicked off the night with a couple of songs and some standup before the main program, projected on a pulldown screen in the back room.

“To tell you the truth, I wasn’t familiar with him until last night,” cafe booking manager Carol Jane said the day after the show. “He’s a bit of a character.”

Kinnard spent the ’70s in L.A. squeezing in extras work between jobs as a writer’s assistant and waiting tables. The high point was a few months of crowd work on “Raging Bull,” he says.

Back in Nashville, he’s been trying to get back into acting.

“It was a playwright from New York’s idea,” Kinnard says of his self-promotional effort. “He said this is how they do it in New York. They take their destiny into their own hands.”